From Aug 2006 - Nov 2013 WeDig provided a live forum for diggers & fans of Vindolanda. It has now been mothballed and will be maintained as a live archive.

Here you will find preserved 7 years of conversation, photos, & knowledge about a site many people love. Vindolanda gets under the skin. (Figuratively and literally as a volunteer excavator!) It's a place you remember, filled with people you remember!

The Exeter Book is a collection of Old English poetry, maxims, riddles, and whatnot, miraculously preserved now for over 1000 years. In it is a remarkable poem called The Ruin, probably written first in the 8th Century.

Though this isn't directly related to Vindolanda (it's possibly about Bath), it's a striking piece. An awareness of the enormous works that still stood dotting the English landscape, most crumbling away but still impressive. It is extremely easy to picture an 8th Century wanderer of Hadrian's Wall Country seeing his or her world in similar light.

Here is the first section of the poem. Original Anglo-Saxon first, followed below by modern translation:

Wondrous is this masonry; fates broke it.Courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying.Roofs are fallen, ruinous towers,the frosty gate with frost on cement is ravaged,chipped roofs are torn, fallen,undermined by old age. The grasp of the earth possessesthe mighty builders, perished and fallen,the hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generationsof people have departed. Often this wall,lichen-grey and stained with red, experienced one reign after another,remained standing under storms; the high wide gate has collapsed.Still the masonry endures...

The folks who came to Britain after the Romans may not have had the same technical skill. Or the same administrative skill. But anyone reading such beautiful words as that would be hard pressed to call them barbarians!